Winemakers across Canada have struggled in the past few years with a biblical litany of natural disasters: fires, floods, hurricanes and temperatures both bone-chilling and broiling. The result has been dead vines, lost harvests and hundreds of millions of dollars lost.

In Ontario, Niagara winemakers faced a severe grape shortage in 2022, after a combination of heavy rains and a cold snap damaged roughly half the region’s grape vines. In 2023, a polar vortex descended on Nova Scotia, costing the province’s fledgling wine industry one-quarter of its crop. That fall, Hurricane Lee blew through the province, damaging vineyards. That was the same year that a freakish cold snap laid waste to British Columbia’s wine harvest, cutting production nearly in half. The province’s winemakers hoped to make up their losses the following year—only to face another blast of Arctic air in 2024, which wiped out nearly all the grapes, costing the region an estimated $445 million. (Things got even bleaker later that year, when wildfires cut the summer tourism season short.)

Losing a harvest is difficult. Replanting an entire vineyard is a disaster, especially for small growers who don’t have the roughly $40,000 per acre needed to plant new vines, let alone wait three years for them to bear fruit. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of for-sale signs hanging up in the Okanagan this past year.

This extreme weather is only going to get more extreme. Freak cold snaps and heat domes will become more common, hurricanes will get more violent and wildfires will grow bigger. And every time disasters damage a harvest, they put another dent in an industry that’s worth, according to the Wine Growers of Canada, more than $11 billion annually in Canada, from coast to coast. In B.C., 326 wineries attract a million visitors per year; in Ontario, they draw more than 2.6 million and, in Nova Scotia, an up-and-comer region, they bring in 150,000 visitors........

© Macleans